Our source, a former Microsoft executive who spent years working with Sinofsky and candidly does not like him, gave us one such specific example.

It's a story about how Sinofsky's work style drove Ray Ozzie out of Microsoft.

Ray Ozzie is best known for creating Lotus Notes. After that, he founded a software company called Groove Networks, which was valued at $250 million in 2001. In 2005, Microsoft bought Groove Networks for one big reason: to get Ozzie on board.

The company made Ozzie Microsoft's CTO and chief software architect, a role previously held by Bill Gates.

Indeed, inside and outside of Microsoft, Ray Ozzie was considered to be the successor to Gates as the big brain behind Microsoft.

But then, five short years later, Ozzie quit.

Why?

Our source says blame Sinofsky.

Sinofsky was a hardy political in-fighter says this source. Though not a "brash" one – "He's passive aggressive. He's more political and oblique."

He did one thing in particular that drove Ozzie nuts.

"Ray produced some products that you could think of as cloud-based fabric products. The plan was that Ray would hand them over to Sinofsky's team and Sinofsky's team would ship them. [But] when those products made it into Steve's team, Steve effectively killed them. 'You know. We're just not going to ship them.' If it was something that Steve didn't think worked he'd just not ship them and they'd die. There'd be no discussion about it. He'd just kind of passively aggressively do it. Take the product and kill it."

Eventually, says our source, this pattern was enough to drive Ozzie out of the company.

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As a former MSFT employee (at a low, far from exec level), all the hearsay I heard about Sinofsky 3-4 years ago is being told in these stories. He's great at removing inefficiencies from processes, but horrible at innovation / big picture / working with others. Exactly the right person to fix Vista and turn it into Windows 7. Exactly the wrong person to get MSFT into the Tablet/Phone/Cloud space.
Keeping what you're doing in Windows a secret from other high level execs doesn't help the overall company -- it leads to duplicated / triplicated work.
It's too bad Ballmer and Gates couldn't see this 5 years ago -- and instead Sinofsky kept expanding his power/role.
Sinofsky also hated Ozzie because Sinofsky wanted the Chief Software Architect position when Gates left and then basically decided since he didn't get it he wouldn't do anything that would help Ozzie succeed -- this is also hearsay that I was hearing 4 years ago that's turning out to be likely true.